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subjects, amounting to an apparently deliberate pairing of alternative
viewpoints. Disputations on a wide variety of controversial topics are,
as it were, frozen and packed upon the shelves, their matters in
controversy kept unresolved forever. It is as if the collector had sought
to make his collection uniformly impersonal. On the same page of the
printed Catalogue, for example, are a denunciation of the unreformed
universities by Edward Webster (
Academiarum Examen or the
Examination of the Academies,
a printed text of 1654 from his sermon
of 1653) and Edward Waterhouse’s response to Webster’s sermon, his
Humble Apologie for Learning and Learned Men
(1653).
Six works by
Andrew Marvell, printed between 1672 and 1680, are accompanied by
Mr Theophilus Thorowthistle’s
Sober Reflections or A Solid
Confutation of Mr Andrew Marvell's Works
(1674)
and, in reply,
Marvell’s
Plain-dealing or A full and Particular Examination of a Late
Treatise
(
Cambridge, 1675). Two copies of Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s
Dissuasions from Popery
are accompanied by Edward Worsley’s
Truth
Will Out or A Discourse of Some Untruths Told by Jeremy Taylor in his
Dissuasions from Popery.
There is a copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici,
its argument generally favourable to the scientific
principles laid down by Sir Francis Bacon, but also
Medicus
Medicatus
—“
The Doctor Dosed With His Own Medicine”—which is in
outright opposition to the scientific principles of both Browne and
Bacon. Both works are bound together in one volume in this Library.
Certainly the books do illustrate facts already known from other
sources about Thomas Plume. A comparison of their range of subjects
with his contemporaries’ collections—as described by Pepys and
Evelyn in their diaries, for example—confirms that it is reasonable to
consider the Plume Library “a guide to the culture of the seventeenth
century” [1(a)], very similar to those of other cultured, alert, inquisitive
men of his time. Yet clearly, beyond such a purely illustrative function
the books will not serve independently as a reliable biographical source.
In particular they fail to shed any light on the years 1649 to 1662,
when there is no certain record of Thomas Plume’s life. It must have
been the most formative period for him, when he came